Effectual

The Challenge: Craft a narrative and visual language to elicit a perception of expertise and commitment

Although a relatively new company, Effectual’s team consists of highly experienced, accomplished individuals who thrive on problem solving. In the constantly shifting world of technology and data, Effectual keeps their process fluid and their solutions custom, becoming not just a vendor, but a lasting IT partner to business. Their impact goes beyond a customer’s technology, and addresses their overall business goals. Effectual needed a website that clearly demonstrated their experience and insider knowledge of the industry. Simultaneously, they had to reinforce their partnership-oriented engagements with their clients, and their agile, dynamic approach to problem solving without perceived as a startup.

Understand the business and its place in the industry

Since Effectual is headquartered in Hoboken right across the Hudson from us, we took the opportunity to hold in-depth discovery sessions to fully understand their business, industry, and differentiators. We dug deep into engagement scenarios, and immersed ourselves in the process that Effectual follows with their customers.

After conducting both a visual and a business audit of major competitors in the industry, Effectual’s differentiators — the ingredients of their special sauce — became evident. Combining their team’s expertise (average industry experience of 15 years), a full-service yet flexible approach, and a focus on not just technology but overall business goals, Effectual is able to tailor their solutions to each client’s particular needs.

Enter: Moodframes™

Similar to Effectual, we keep our process fluid too. To consolidate content for a simpler, more focused website and to establish the right visual language, we combined moodboards and wireframes — what would normally be two separate exercises — into a single phase, aptly coined MoodFrames by our very own William “BJ” Fleming.

This allowed us to be agile as we reviewed examples of visual design and content organization at once. The results from this phase provided us with a clear understanding of the information architecture for the website as well as a vision for the brand’s expansion into the web.

Owning the Triangle

We knew the existing Effectual brand needed a refresh to align the business with the dynamic and shifting world of cloud technology. At the same time, we wanted to retain recognizable and widely-used design elements like their logo and the deep, rich, purple color.

We did not want to rely solely on photography throughout the website; despite high-quality, convincing images from vendors like Unsplash, abstract concepts like partnerships, business goals, and cloud technology can be difficult to convey in photography. We instead turned to the brand, extracting a key element from the logomark.

Using the triangle, which serves as the top and bottom arms of their logomark, we created a series of patterns consisting of floating yet similar shapes. Structured yet adaptive, just like Effectual’s approach to problem solving. This approach allows Effectual to have an impact on a vast range of verticals. To visualize this idea, we began to incorporate Effectual’s triangles in a series of cityscape and business architecture photos, layering them in front and weaving them behind the subjects of the image. The result was a visual construct where any instance of triangles in a photo came to represent Effectual’s influence.